ICP-OES and ICP-MS: technical operation and quality control

Analysts running ICP instrumentation and technical staff reviewing trace elemental data.

Covers both techniques together, since the sample preparation, calibration and QC thinking are shared and the interference behaviour is where they diverge.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• The techniques

  OES and MS compared — sensitivity, working range and where each is the right choice

• Sample preparation

  Digestion, acids, vessels and the contamination each can introduce

• Calibration

  Standards, internal standards, matrix matching and standard addition

• Interferences

  Spectral, polyatomic, isobaric and matrix effects, and the strategies against each

• Blanks and contamination

  The laboratory environment as the dominant source at trace level

• Detection limits

  Establishing LOD and LOQ honestly, and reporting below them

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Select the appropriate technique and preparation route for a given matrix and level.
2. 02Recognise and correct the interferences that affect your specific analytes.
3. 03Control contamination well enough that a trace-level result means something.
4. 04Establish and report detection and quantitation limits defensibly.

At trace levels the laboratory is usually the largest source of the analyte. Dust, acids, vessels, water and gloves all contribute, and a blank that has not been thought about turns a contamination result into a sample result.

Interferences are the other half. A polyatomic interference on a low-mass element produces a confident, reproducible, wrong answer, and reproducibility is exactly what makes it convincing.

Delivered over 2 days, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.